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Sunday, February 3, 2013

The Runaway Bunny

Extremely cute child reviews the book by Margaret Wise Brown.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was a prolific American author of children's literature, including the books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd.

The middle child of three whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, Brown was born in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, granddaughter of Benjamin Gratz Brown. In 1923 she attended boarding school in Woodstock, Connecticut, while her parents were living in Canterbury. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher, and also studied art. It was while working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City that she started writing books for children. Her first book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers.

Brown then went on to develop her Here and Now stories, and later the Noisy Book series while employed as an editor at William R. Scott. Her popular book The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Also in 1946, Brown wrote The Little Island and Little Lost Lamb, both under the pseudonym Golden MacDonald and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. The former won a Caldecott Honor recognition in 1946 and the latter the Caldecott Medal in 1947. In the early 1950s, she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.

In 1952, Brown met James Stillman 'Pebble' Rockefeller Jr. at a
party, and they became engaged. Later that year, while on a book tour in
Nice, France, she unexpectedly died at 42 of an embolism, two weeks after emergency surgery for an ovarian cyst.
(Kicking up her leg to show the doctor how well she was feeling
ironically caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge
and travel to her heart.)
By the time of Brown's death, she had authored well over one hundred
books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House" in Vinalhaven, Maine.

Brown left behind over 70 unpublished manuscripts. Her sister,
Roberta Brown Rauch, after unsuccessfully trying to sell them, kept them
in a cedar trunk for decades. In 1991, Amy Gary of WaterMark Inc.,
rediscovered the paper-clipped bundles of the more than 500 typewritten
pages and set about getting the stories published.

Many of Brown's books have been re-released with new illustrations
decades after their original publication. Many more of her books are
still in print with the original illustrations. Her books have been
translated into several languages; biographies on Brown for children
have been written by Leonard S. Marcus (Harper Paperbacks, 1999) and
Jill C. Wheeler (Checkerboard Books, 2006). Have a Carrot, a Freudian
analysis of her "classic series" of bunny books has been written by
Claudia H. Pearson (Look Again Press, 2010).